Measuring The Expert Impact: Retail’s Silver Bullet

It’s no wonder consumers are overwhelmed. Faced with contradictory online reviews and too many ever-changing options, many shoppers go into stores looking for advice but leave confused and frustrated. Helpful sales associates are so few and far between, you almost expect to see tumbleweeds roll by. When help finally arrives, it can be from an associate who knows or cares less than a person who’s done one online search.  On the other hand, high-quality help makes a huge difference in getting prospective customers over the hump from “just looking” to happily buying.

Yet for three decades retail’s focus on low prices and broad selection has added up to less help for consumers. With endless choices for consumers today, across a dizzying number of SKUs, retailers need to understand that consumers want and seek out expert guidance for their buying decisions as much as ever before.

Until now, retailers have had very little data available to show the impact of investing in their sales staff. But with more than 90 percent of all retail commerce still happening in physical stores, retailers need to look more deeply into building engaged, knowledgeable associates.

To answer the question of just how much value brand knowledge and helpful expertise can have on the sales floor, we commissioned Marshall Fisher, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Santiago Gallino of the Tuck School at Dartmouth, to lead a study involving the sales performance of more than 63,500 retail sales associates in 330 stores over two years.  The study compares point-of-sale data to sales associates’ engagement with Experticity’s unique training platforms in the categories and brands they sell. The study was designed to normalize for variables like tenure, inventory levels and hours worked to isolate the impact of more engaged sales associates.

The result: sales associates who engage with online brand education sell more.  A lot more! The study shows that sales associates who interacted with just one short online training course sold 69 percent more than those who didn’t.  And associates who completed six or more short courses sold 123 percent more than those who took none.

There are some specific steps retailers and brands can take to use this data to improve their businesses.

• Invest in the right people: There are people out there who love and use the products you sell every day.  They’re the ones to get working even harder on your behalf.
• Train the people who love your stuff: So often retail employees get trained in things like how to improve service. That has a place, but if they don’t know the products they’re talking with consumers about inside and out, they won’t be able to provide the proper guidance.  And if your customers have a bad experience, after they leave your store, that smiley face from your team doesn’t mean much.
• Reward expertise: If your employees are in love with the products you sell and know a lot about them, then they probably want to be rewarded with the stuff you sell — discounts on merchandise, tickets to related events, etc.
• Evangelize the value of helpful expertise: We are all consumers and understand how a great buying experience impacts our satisfaction.  Just leading people to the lowest price on your shelf doesn’t build relationships.  Ask customers what they want, why they want it, and help them understand how they’ll get the most out of their purchase.

Today’s smartest retail and product brands understand that data and analytics are essential to showing how their investment in better sales associates impacts their ROI – and those who invest in great buying experiences can both build brand advocates and give customers the helpful expertise they need.

Contributed by Tom Stockham, Chief Executive Officer of Experticity. Stockham is responsible for guiding the company’s efforts to make people with helpful expertise a key part of successful retail commerce.